27

Oct

Thank You For Not Sitting

I’m a proud Big Brother through Big Brothers and Big Sisters of Sedgwick County, and my Little Brother is really into Halloween. I mean he LOVES Halloween. So on one of our recent weekly outings, we decided to go to a Halloween store. You know the kind I’m talking about–the ones that move into an unoccupied big box space every year for the month of October to sell as much fake blood and cottony spider webs as the local economy will allow. Some of these stores offer a dynamic experience–they’re dark, crowded, and filled with the battery-operated sounds of howling and shrieking doodads.

This time, we chose the wrong Halloween store. After taking just a few steps inside, we were greeted everywhere with orange and black paper hangings, but these were not decorations. Have a look:

I don’t know about you, but signs like these transport me back to the worldview I had in sixth grade. The one who believed no one can tell me what to do because everyone is stupid. While looking at these masks, it was hard not to imagine a grumpy bingo caller with a cigarette hanging out of her mouth, looking over my shoulder and saying don’t…don’t…DON’T. You’re going to ruin everything. These signs weren’t the worst of them, either. Check this one out:

It’s stupid enough for you to expect me to buy a mask without trying it on, but no pictures? Why?

Naturally, I took my phone out and photographed away, hoping an employee would come along and…throw me out of the store? I don’t know. I guess you could say I was just acting like the signs expected I would act. Whatever.

Pretty obvious moral to the story, here. If you treat your customers with mistrust and disdain, they will respond in kind. Remember–customer experience is everything.

This reminds me of a recent trip to the Philippines I took with my wife, where all of the furniture in a department store was marked with signs that said “Thank You For Not Sitting.”